This week started out a little rough. For the past couple of weeks, we’ve had two birthmothers looking over our profile, & on Monday, our agency called to let us know neither of the birthmothers chose us. Obviously, we knew that was a very real possibility, but it is so hard not to get your hopes up. After continually reminding ourselves that God is in control & has this journey all mapped out for us & knows exactly what baby He will miraculously place into our family, we realized after a couple of days, we needed to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off & continue on.

We are still in the middle of completing our home-study which includes paperwork, physicals {exciting, right?}, fingerprinting {kind of makes you feel like a criminal}, begging friends to say nice things about you in referral letters, lots & lots of reading & this coming week, our first of four face-to-face meetings with our social worker. We also continue to wait & pray for a birthmother to choose us through our agency.

One of the most daunting parts of adopting is of course, the cost. There are several factors that cause some adoptions to be pricier than others {for example: domestic vs. international, infant vs. older child}. In our case, we have our agency fees, home-study costs, birthmother expenses {not all states allow adoptive families to pay birthmother expenses, but the state in which our agency is located does} & attorney fees, which will bring us up to $28,000 – $34,000, not including our travel expenses once the baby is born. It’s a little shocking I’m sure, I know it was for me when we first started looking into adopting a couple years ago.

God has definitely blessed us greatly & we have been able to save up a good chunk for this over the past two years in addition to being overwhelmingly blessed by a couple of unexpected gifts recently. But, I believe God has many, many lessons He is teaching us through this process & one of them is humility. Asking for help, financial or otherwise, is extremely difficult for both Caleb & myself, as I’m sure it is for a lot of people. After crunching the numbers for what seems like the hundredth time, we need to raise about $5,000.

One of my first thoughts when I realized we didn’t have quite enough cash lying around for this adoption was that we needed to have a garage sale! Honestly, I know it’s little odd, but I really enjoy having garage sales. I always have a pile of items we no longer need or want & can certainly dig through the house & find many more items to add to it.

So, here’s how you can help. If you are in the Holdrege vicinity and you have some things you would like to part with, we’re taking donations to sell at our garage sale, October 5th & 6th. {weather permitting}. We’d be more than happy to pick up your donations or you can drop them off at our house. Just comment on this post, email me at a_o_wright@yahoo(dot)com or call/text 4zero2-65eight-3361 to arrange a time to pick up or drop off. We’d like to have the items here by September 30th if at all possible in order to have time to prepare. If you’d like to spread the word through your own blog, Facebook or email, we would be forever grateful!

Thank you so much to everyone who took time to write us such encouraging words about our adoption plans. It means so much to have so many sweet friends out there praying for us!

As long as we’ve been talking about adopting & now planning to adopt, things are just now really getting started it seems. And now that the ball is finally rolling, everything needs done, like….right now! So, I have a mountain of agency forms & home study paperwork all over the kitchen table & I’ve spent hours staring at my computer screen trying to put together our adoption profile {if you don’t know what that is, it’s a scrapbook of sorts that birthmothers looks at to get to know prospective adoptive families}. It’s been a little crazy at our house to say the least.

When I started to go through all of our pictures, looking for ones to use in our profile, I realized we didn’t really have any recent photos of just Caleb & I together, or at least not any decent ones:). So, we decided while we were somewhat “put-together” for church yesterday, we’d have a quick, self-portrait taking session. Here’s the best we could do:)…

Actual photographers out there, shield your eyes, I’m sure our self-portraits are painful to look at for anyone who knows what they’re doing!

I’m so sad I overexposed this pic, I love it otherwise!

If you’ve made it this far, thank you, you are very sweet! Most people probably were thinking only moms & grandmas should have to suffer through looking at such pictures;).

Big news right!? We are so excited to grow our family through adoption, I can’t even begin to explain it.

For some of you, I know this may not be earth-shattering news, since we’ve been working towards adoption for over a year now. But, for the most part, we’ve not been very public with that information & I’m not really sure why, other than it all just seems like a very personal decision/situation. Now however, things are starting to happen {maybe, the adoption process is certainly a roller coaster & there are plenty of lows to balance out all of the highs} & I feel like telling everyone!

So, let me back up a bit & explain how we came to this decision to adopt. Adoption is something that has been on my heart long before Caleb & I married, or even met. You see, the Bible commands us to care for the orphans (James 1:27) & every time I’d hear or read of a story about adoption, there was this little nudge inside of me that said, someday, I want my family to grow through adoption. {Please don’t mistake me for saying that everyone is called to adopt. God has created us each with our own story & adoption is not for everyone. There are many ways you can be a part of caring for the orphans in this world.}

Fast forward a couple of years. I’ve met my future husband, & Caleb & I discuss adoption & how awesome it would be to adopt one or two children. We decide we’d like to have a couple natural children after we’ve been married a year or two & then add to our family through adoption. Great planning, right!?!

Fast forward another couple of years, & Caleb & I decide we’re ready for our family to grow ;). Well, months start to go by & prayers go up & things aren’t looking to good for our “plans”. As more time goes by, we begin asking God whether His plans for us are to seek fertility treatments or begin the adoption process. Maybe, just maybe, our “plans” were a little out of whack. It’s crazy when God doesn’t follow “the plan”, our plan – ha!

So, after months of prayer & lots of tears, we know God has a different plan for our family, one that may start with adoption rather than ending with it. We pray some more & begin searching out domestic infant adoption agencies.

Where are we at?

Without boring you with all the nitty gritty details, in our search for an agency, we found a few that we liked & ended up on waiting lists for their programs {none of them had immediate openings for waiting families, that’s us}. Today, we are still on those waiting lists and just this week another potential agency came onto our radar so we’re praying about where that might lead.

How can you help?

Prayer! There are so many decisions to make throughout the adoption journey & we want to be sure we are going where God is leading. It’s also a very taxing emotional roller coaster, & on any given day I go through excitement, anxiousness, fear, sadness, frustration & flat out feel overwhelmed by it all sometimes. So prayers for our sanity would be good:). We also want to be praying for the birthmother out there that God has chosen for us. Choosing to give life to the child inside of her & then allowing another family to parent your baby takes an enormous amount of strength & is the greatest sacrifice a mom could ever make. We pray that God would just wrap comforting arms around her & give her peace in making such a tough decision.

I hope to keep everyone updated as things progress & to continue sharing specific prayer requests as they arise. If you would like to be a prayer warrior for us, we would be eternally grateful! We’d love to have you comment below or send us a message so that we can in turn be praying for you too.